Search

iHeartFaces are running a Constructive Feedback Friday this week – and I think it’s still Friday here in Scotland – just – so here goes.

First up this little stunner.

The trick needed here is to selectively increase the exposure.

So to start with I open the photo in Photoshop and add an exposure adjustment layer increasing the exposure +2.41. I then use a layer mask to remove the increased exposure from the background and flatten the image.

This revealed a bt too much shine on the face for my liking so to reduce this I am gonna blur it a bit.

First of all I select the skin using Select, Colour Range and set the fuzziness to 130 before clicking anywhere on the face.

Copy and paste the selected pixels to a new layer and hide the bottom layer. It should look like this…

That’s too much of the photo to blur so using the eraser tool with a soft edge get rid of everything you want to keep sharp, remembering eyes, mouth and eyebrows!

Now use Filter-Blur-Surface Blur and set it to Radious 44 and Threshold 54 to really exaggerate the blur

Turn the back layer on again and what you’ve got now is one very plastic looking child – but worry ye not.

Reduce the opacity of the top layer to 20% … less is more right?

Okay – we could stop there but I’ve not had a chance to play with Lightroom yet so I save it as a PSD file and imported it into LR3.

And slide those sliders.

Temp +9

Fill Light 14

Blacks 7

Vibrance +11

Sharpening 68

Noise Reduction 19

Colour 13

Post Crop Vignetting Amount -20

Voila!

And if you can’t be bothered scrolling back to see the original…

I’ve not touched the crop cos I like it as it is – just needed a bit more sunshine!

THANK YOU SO MUCH!!! I love this edit and had been trying to figure out how to do just this and hadn’t been able to. I very much appreciate the step by step. When I have some time I’ll have to see if I can do the same thing using my program (GIMP). Do you mind my saving your edit for printing?